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This is a post I've been meaning to write for awhile, actually, and it's about two subjects important to me: transness and philosophy.
This is part paper review and part extension into a new domain for the paper
Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body
by Margrit Shildrick. This is an old paper from the 90s that is dealing with the light a post-humanist approach can shed on feminism and patriarchal beliefs.
The rough idea of the paper is that there's this way that, in a society that privileges some points of view more than others, that there becomes a *default* person, a view-from-nowhere that is the default set of experiences we use to judge the world.
In a patriarchal culture, this is generally the male perspective and the male body becomes the origin point of the coordinate map: the reference point for how we understand being human.
Shildrick relates this to our rhetorical relationship to nature: nature as both something separate from us and nature as something to be controlled, managed, conquered. This then ties into monstrosity as nature untamed, ungovernable, incomprehensible.
The monstrous is that which is separate from the default view. As such, the monster is inherently alien and defined through opposition.
And here's the insight I really want to play with here: there's a feedback loop that happens where the monstrous is both defined as not-me but also I start to define myself as not-monster instead.
But, of course, the point is that human and nature were never actually wholly disparate the same way, say, man and woman are never wholly disparate things. That means you can't really define the monster or yourself via negation, not without losing some part of yourself that existed in the overlap.
And so I'm going to here diverge from the paper and explore this in the domain of trans experience in ways that Shildrick doesn't.
So the idea of self-definition as a double-negation is fascinating to me because it's very much reminiscent of the ways that in non-classical logics isn't actually an identity. The ability to define something by what it can't not be doesn't actually give us the ability to define something in its full richness.
Practically, this leads to the kinds of toxic masculinity you see made fun of with things like the "fellas is it gay...?" meme, where all sorts of innocuous actions are weighed against whether they're emasculating to straight men because of some kind of inscrutable rules of manhood.
A post about the "fellas is it gay joke" and the examples that inspired it.
Of course, beyond the jokes the dark aspect is that this kind of masculinity-defined-as-not-feminine leads to men punishing each other for very human, normal things like crying, wanting affection, or needing help.
Where this comes into transness is the way that cis people also start to define their own experience of gender and sex by what *isn't* trans.
One of the most obvious classes of examples I've seen are the ways that anti-trans/gendercrit types see trans women everywhere:
A famous example accusing cis female athletes of being men
If you look at the linked example and others the pattern becomes clear: gendercrit cis women deny the possibility of other cis women having bodies outside of a very narrow range: flat chests, strong jawlines, visible muscles all become suspect.
Of course, cis women can have all of those features, but the gendercrits have decided on a framework that makes trans women monsters and denies that there is a large overlap in bodies and experiences between us and cis women.
This isn't conjecture this is rather explicit in the rhetoric around "we can always tell", which is a bit of a meme phrase that comes from the constant and very real claim that trans people *never* blend in as cis and that "passing" is a mere fiction invented by trans people and indulged by our allies. Sometimes the claim is that hormones can't really change your appearance appreciably. Sometimes the claim is more metaphysical or evo-psychological, that there is an inherent essence that can be intuited without fail.
This belief leads to many strange moments, like the infamous twitter post where a cis woman claimed that the women's only hostel she planned to stay at was infested with trans women because she saw too many large shoes in the entryway. The obvious absurdity is that, well, there aren't actually that many of us. We also don't tend to have conventions at random hostels. The most likely explanation is that some of the women staying there didn't have small feet, because *many women don't*.
And while these moments seem funny again there's a darker side of enforcement: cis women are policing each other's bodies and behavior on the grounds of trying to ferret out who the *real* women are.
For years now we've had the problem of butch women being harassed in bathrooms and changing areas. In fact, this problem is old enough that it was already referenced as a common thing in Dykes to Watch Out For decades ago.
We can also see it in the ways athletes like Caster Semenya have been treated as acceptable losses to prevent trans women from gaining entry into women's athletics.
Through the insistence that trans bodies and cis bodies have no real overlap, we create a new worldview where even cis women whose bodies and behavior exists in the space between what cis women can be and what they insist cis women must be are then punished.
It doesn't seem like a coincidence that the first high profile causality of this new paradigm is a woman who is both black and gay, for the narrowing of acceptable selves is almost certainly going to shrink in radius around the people already *most* acceptable.
Bringing things back around to Shildrick's paper, I think transness is inherently problematic to attempts to solidify categories of male & female and trans people are "monsters" in the sense of providing alternative ways of being, of defining self, and we exist at borders that reveal the boundary lines were never solid or still.
This makes us threatening to patriarchal definitions of sex and gender, which is why---over time---the attempts of the gendercrits to define themselves as not trans is forcing them towards very conservative, anti-feminist, ideas: that sexual violence is an innate male trait, that women are always weaker than men, that men and women must exist in separate spheres.
My claim here is that any attempt at a trans-exclusionary feminism will always devolve back into these inherently anti-feminist positions just by the nature of trying to exclude trans women from womanhood.
We are the monsters you see looking back in the mirror. To deny us is to deny everything feminism is fighting for.